J.J. Abrams Biography

J.J. Abrams is a television producer and filmmaker whose mighty list of credits includes the TV series Felicity, Alias and Lost, and the feature films Cloverfield, Super 8, Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Abrams was born in New York but grew up in southern California, where his dad was a TV producer. A movie buff from youth, Abrams was still a teenager when he managed to get a job repairing Steven Spielberg‘s personal 8 mm movies. He didn’t meet Spielberg, but it was the first step in what proved later to be a collaborative professional relationship.

Instead of going to film school, Abrams headed to Sarah Lawrence College. Before graduating in 1988, he sold a film treatment that became the 1990 comedy Taking Care of Business. A year out of college, he sold a script that became the 1991 Harrison Ford movie Regarding Henry.

During the 1990s, he wrote screenplays (including 1992’s Forever Young and 1998’s Armageddon), and then he jumped into serial television with the hit show Felicity (1998-2002, starring Keri Russell). Abrams followed up with the hit series Alias (2001-06, starring Jennifer Garner), and then the smash hit Lost (2004-10), a mysterious story of plane crash survivors on a deserted island.

His success in television led to directing features and ever bigger projects, including Mission Impossible III (2006, starring Tom Cruise), the 2009 version of Star Trek (starring Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto), Super 8 (2011, produced by Spielberg) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013, with Zoe Saldana). He then took the helm of another famous franchise, directing Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015, starring Daisy Ridley), the first Star Wars movie made after George Lucas sold Lucasfilms to the Walt Disney Company.